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sir_readalot's reviews
373 reviews
The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson
3.0
Better than previous book, worse than first book. 300+ pages are a bit too much to remind the reader what happened in book 1.
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
2.0
1.5 Stars. I am giving it 2 just because of its amazing looking cover.
Now straight to the review:
• This book has an issue of severe lack of imagination and originality. What it does not lack is ‘info dumping’ and clichés. On the front page it is written “Deserves to be as big as Game of Thrones” and I couldn’t have disagreed more. There is nothing original about the story. I got sucked into it by the Victorian English type of narrative but as the book progresses it becomes clear that the author tried too hard to carry on with her flowery prose and failed. It becomes inconsistent pretty fast. The dialogues seem like they are written by Shakespeare wannabes. They feel so inorganic, empty, and hollow. Dialogues are so weak that I doubt I will remember any of them after a week.
• First of all the Maps are BAD. There is no demarcation of border of a country. And the names of the countries just float over the ocean, at a glance it looks like the mentioned countries are underwater. It’s pretty difficult and frustrating to orient the description of places and landscapes with the map.
• The world-building is weak, very very weak. The author claims the novel to be an epic fantasy but she fails to build a fantastical world. Granted she infused various cultures in this novel but that’s all. The religions that this book relies heavily upon are directly drawn from our eastern and western culture. Even the conversion parts are directly taken from history leaving no place for an original well thought out fantasy world. Even this could have been made in a far better way. A fantasy world is as good as its own lore and histories and the way they are integrated in the main story. However in this case they are integrated clumsily and very rigidly. Most of the lores and histories we come across are through most inorganic forms like inner monologue and “It’s storytelling time” scenarios. Every time there is a need to relay new info on history, it goes like “Now I will tell you my tale…”. It is not how you want to explore a new world. The whole world-building here is just more and more info-dumping with less actual involvement of the characters. Even in the time where the story takes place the world is so vague. The characters travel from one place to another in a span of days or weeks and we hardly ever experience the landscape they are passing through. It’s like everything happening around the characters is just blur, not important at all. But there are pages after pages of description of the food served on the table for feast and Queen’s breakfast, flowers, garden vines and dresses. This made the book more and more tedious.
• The pacing is bad at best and incoherent till the end. The book starts slow which is justified because of all the character intros and all but when you feel like it should pick up pace the story just stops. And this continues for hundreds of pages. Literally nothing happens at all. Then suddenly so much is happening in next 20 or so pages then another slog. It’s just gruelling. Action sequences are written very poorly and are often vague. For example in one sequence author wrote “Death came for them like a desert wind”. That’s all. That is the whole description of the action sequence. WTH! How did they die? They choked on your bad writing?
• Now let’s talk about the characters, my least favourite part in the whole book. We have tons of characters and their PoVs but the characters have absolutely zero depth. They are bland and dull. They have no personality. These characters are in their 20’s to 30’s and yet they are so immature it’s laughable. There is no character development throughout the book. There is no conflict, nobody questions anything. And every character is totally oblivious to their surrounding area and the people. The Queen who is revered by her people has never been seen being affected by her people. We don’t even get a good look at how common folk get affected by the whole ordeal and what are they going through. The common folk in this story are just used as background prop or dragon food. Even the other characters are so full of themselves no one sees past what they want to see. Every character is either black or white. There is no morally gray character. You call it an epic fantasy yet you don’t include characters that tread beyond good or evil. There is no complexity or build up to any character and no consequences to their actions. It’s like “Oh I fought a wyvern in the town hall with nothing but my utter stupidity. Oh people died? I don’t care….you see they are not main characters of the story; I am. Pay attention to me.” It takes real talent to make a fire-wielding mage/ assassin a naïve bland character with no flair. Again with no build up she kills trained people, uses fire, fights wyvern and a mentor figure pretty easily. And with all the fights and killing one expects a duality in morale or an inner conflict but she has none. Because she is always in the right. How is that even relatable by any means? Let’s not talk about Loth. He’s just a plot device only there to move the story forward. Now with the dragon rider from east….well there isn’t much dragon riding to begin with. She remains largely absent throughout the story. Her character starts as one of the few interesting things in the book but hundreds of pages and book full of life-changing events later there is essentially no growth in her character. Her character development remains nil. It’s pretty disappointing to see 800+ pages full of dull characters. Some reactions of the characters to specific events in the book are so convoluted that it seems like it’s forced upon and naturally you can not relate to it at all. The characters are so distant that the unfortunate circumstances they face leave no lasting effect at all. Events that should have been heart wrenching barely leaves a mark.
• This is not a Feminist story; this is a gender reversal story. The way it has been marketed is so wrong. It has been said to be “A Feminist successor to Lord of The Rings”, well making most of the characters female and all the male characters significantly weak doesn’t make a story feminist. Author just reversed the gender roles but continued with a same sexist storytelling. This is certainly not empowering. Let’s dive a little deep. As we see The Priory of The Orange Tree tells a story of a queendom. But this is only ruled by queens because they only happen to have female progeny. None of the queens actually earned the throne. There only achievement was to be born. There was no struggle no fear of losing the throne and yet people still revered the bloodline, no questions asked. How is that empowering? Even if we don’t take into account the whole ‘female only heir’ part, the Queen is only a queen by name, she is always just being manipulated by others into doing what they want. Yay! Go feminism! For the most part of the story the Queen is only relevant because she has the ability to reproduce the next Queen. Oh so original! I often come across people complaining about The Wheel of Time and Robert Jordan about their weak handling of the female characters but after reading this I can definitely say what Robert Jordan did with the female characters is far above and beyond anything this book has to offer. He gave us an actual Queendom where the queen is not just a figurehead. She has to fight for her claim to the throne and her people and who actually thinks her subjects to be the most important part of her Queendom. In WoT we actually see lots of strong female characters with depth, own personality, inner conflict and the change of perspective as the story progresses. And we see none in Priory. Here the Queen is just a naïve woman-child in her late 20’s who just throws temper tantrums and has no regard for her subjects or whatsoever. This is a queen who is jealous of her to be born child because to her understanding after giving birth to an heir her duty will be fulfilled and she will be cast aside and she won’t have the centre stage. How is that empowering when the Queen of the story sees herself only as a mere mean of childbearing? In the book it is well established that a woman has two choices, either have a child or live for herself. She has to sacrifice her ambition in order to raise a child or she has to sacrifice motherhood in order to be someone important. She can’t be a good mother and be a let’s say a figure that people look up to. That is pretty clear from the lack of mother figures that play an important role in the plot of the story. In this day and age the author just put her so called strong female characters in that traditional binary and still expects the reader to hail this book as a game-changing feminist novel.
• The plot heavily depends upon coincidences, instinct and intuitions; another example of poor writing. The author could have justified those actions by using the environment and surrounding in a more methodical way or by more natural means but she went with easiest way possible, i.e. coincidences. The characters just find the objects they look for or when they are facing some life threatening conditions they just happen to stumble upon ways for their ridiculous escape. And every character has like god gifted intuition. They are so on point that it is ridiculous. This eliminates any chance of tension building. Not just one or two characters, every character has spot on instincts. The celestial jewels that were lost for thousand years just happen to be lying around in the coffin of the person who last used it. The overhyped super powerful sword that can slay the big bad villain is missing for a thousand years and is being look for since its disappearance but to no success. Suddenly a guy remembers where the sword is supposed to be and voila! The sword is there. That place also happens to be the birthplace of the knight who first wielded the sword. I am no ruler but if I wanted to find that sword wouldn’t I look for it in that place first? Now for the fun part, the riddles! There are riddles here and there and the characters just solve the most complex of them with relative ease, conjuring solution out of thin air. For example by sheer luck (like several other instances in the novel) a character once happened to have played in a location during her childhood which is actually the solution of the riddle for the location of the great Wyvern killing sword because screw well-thought-out-treasure-hunting-quest. This is a pretty big flaw. This kind of writing prevented any kind of serious threat building. The story lacks plausible threats and suspense. There is a big wyvern in the cover which may lead audience to think that they possess a great threat but no. There are more political agendas in his book than the number of appearances the draconic creatures make. The main characters are actually more concerned about their political and religious standing than the world ending threat looming over the horizon. From the beginning the author is establishing a narrative about a world that is on the brink of chaos as the big bad evil is about to rise once again and his underlings are loose, wreaking havoc over the world. There is also a deadly plague spreading over the population that is also an indicator of increasing power of the ancient villain. But among these super deadly conditions the death toll is surprisingly very low. Apart from that there are nations at war, inner politics, betrayals, random riots by heretics and yet people come out of it with little of their dead. Even when we see the so called army leaders of the draconic army attack the city they are happier with a conversation and bare minimum casualties. I don’t know but if someone wants to take over the world, he/she would want to demonstrate their devastating power by let’s say burning a city to the ground so people actually take them as a world ending threat. Like the human characters the author has managed to make her reptilian characters bland too. Even the villains lacked personality and ambition. Again the progress of the story heavily depends upon “Somehow she knew what to do” and “Instincts told her how to use it”, proving severe lack of imagination from the author’s part.
I want to point out to a specific part in the story. We see a character going into coma a few times and one time she is in that state for weeks (can you imagine?) after being poisoned; there was no medicinal remedy available for the poison and no way to force-feed a patient in a state of coma and yet she is fed only drops of honey for weeks like that’s all it is needed to keep her going (apparently it was). And finally when she is out of coma with the help of few drops of honey, her brain is totally well functional. No damage, no brain weakness, nothing. After such a long period in a state of unconsciousness you would expect some difficulty in orientation at the very least, but know we don’t have that here. As soon as she wakes up she is totally fine with all the memories and lies she was holding onto before going into coma. Though she is describes physically weak post-coma, this doesn’t last long. After few hours she is up and about like her pre-coma self and is literally ready to have sex with her lover that very day. I don’t know if it could have been any worse.
• There is so much dull info dumping that it gets frustratingly boring. You have an 800pages book where there is a world levelling threat and the build up is 750+ pages. It’s just plain gruelling. And when the last battle actually occurs, it’s just disappointing and anti-climatic. The amount of unimportant information this book contains is enough to be published as another ‘Stand Alone’. For example whenever we see a character, she is introduced as “This is X, daughter of Y who was the granddaughter of Z who helped in slaying D who was the great general of …….and so on”. I could have looked over it if it was done only few times and while introducing the characters but no, it is done with most characters over and over again till the end. Even after we get all the details about the characters we still get the same info over and over again. With all this information lying around the author never actually tries to give information about the landscape and the world in which the story is set in. Whenever there is a long journey and a scope for exploring a new world she just stops trying. Every time a character goes on a long journey he/she just stumbles upon great mythical beasts that carry them to their destination in superfast mind-numbing pace.
• Now let’s talk about the romance part.
The primary relationship/the lesbian relationship was sudden, strange, confusingly-written and very clumsily executed. First we see one being uncomfortable by the feelings she develops for the other, then we see her being jealous of the other’s lover and then we see the other suddenly giving attention to her in spite of having a lover. All of this happens without one conveying her feelings even slightly to the other. Strong romances cannot be built upon unspoken emotions, especially upon weirdly written emotions. They hardly have enough interactions before they have full-blown sex. The timing of the sex could not have been weirder. One had just miscarried and been under the knife and was still recovering from all the bruises she received during a wyrm invasion. That’s just not how general human physiology works.
Now for the secondary relationship/the gay relationship; in this world it is well established that the society is comfortable with homosexual relationships and yet they had to hide their relationship from the society. The gay male character was married to a woman and the wife knew all along that he was in a secret relationship with a man but she didn’t harbour any ill feelings against him to make sure her husband is happy. It just does not make any sense at all. She wanted her husband to be happy and yet he had to live a lie and sneak behind her back to be with his lover. Clearly the other man was making him happy so why not let them live their life together? This whole plot line was a mess, just like many others.
• To sum it all up, the book did not sit well with me at all. The whole thing just felt like a big bowl of flattery that each character threw towards the other characters. Don’t believe the reviews you see on the cover. These are not all the flaws I encountered, these are some of the flaws I encountered while reading the book which I felt like mentioning in my long review.
That’s all. Cheers.
Now straight to the review:
• This book has an issue of severe lack of imagination and originality. What it does not lack is ‘info dumping’ and clichés. On the front page it is written “Deserves to be as big as Game of Thrones” and I couldn’t have disagreed more. There is nothing original about the story. I got sucked into it by the Victorian English type of narrative but as the book progresses it becomes clear that the author tried too hard to carry on with her flowery prose and failed. It becomes inconsistent pretty fast. The dialogues seem like they are written by Shakespeare wannabes. They feel so inorganic, empty, and hollow. Dialogues are so weak that I doubt I will remember any of them after a week.
• First of all the Maps are BAD. There is no demarcation of border of a country. And the names of the countries just float over the ocean, at a glance it looks like the mentioned countries are underwater. It’s pretty difficult and frustrating to orient the description of places and landscapes with the map.
• The world-building is weak, very very weak. The author claims the novel to be an epic fantasy but she fails to build a fantastical world. Granted she infused various cultures in this novel but that’s all. The religions that this book relies heavily upon are directly drawn from our eastern and western culture. Even the conversion parts are directly taken from history leaving no place for an original well thought out fantasy world. Even this could have been made in a far better way. A fantasy world is as good as its own lore and histories and the way they are integrated in the main story. However in this case they are integrated clumsily and very rigidly. Most of the lores and histories we come across are through most inorganic forms like inner monologue and “It’s storytelling time” scenarios. Every time there is a need to relay new info on history, it goes like “Now I will tell you my tale…”. It is not how you want to explore a new world. The whole world-building here is just more and more info-dumping with less actual involvement of the characters. Even in the time where the story takes place the world is so vague. The characters travel from one place to another in a span of days or weeks and we hardly ever experience the landscape they are passing through. It’s like everything happening around the characters is just blur, not important at all. But there are pages after pages of description of the food served on the table for feast and Queen’s breakfast, flowers, garden vines and dresses. This made the book more and more tedious.
• The pacing is bad at best and incoherent till the end. The book starts slow which is justified because of all the character intros and all but when you feel like it should pick up pace the story just stops. And this continues for hundreds of pages. Literally nothing happens at all. Then suddenly so much is happening in next 20 or so pages then another slog. It’s just gruelling. Action sequences are written very poorly and are often vague. For example in one sequence author wrote “Death came for them like a desert wind”. That’s all. That is the whole description of the action sequence. WTH! How did they die? They choked on your bad writing?
• Now let’s talk about the characters, my least favourite part in the whole book. We have tons of characters and their PoVs but the characters have absolutely zero depth. They are bland and dull. They have no personality. These characters are in their 20’s to 30’s and yet they are so immature it’s laughable. There is no character development throughout the book. There is no conflict, nobody questions anything. And every character is totally oblivious to their surrounding area and the people. The Queen who is revered by her people has never been seen being affected by her people. We don’t even get a good look at how common folk get affected by the whole ordeal and what are they going through. The common folk in this story are just used as background prop or dragon food. Even the other characters are so full of themselves no one sees past what they want to see. Every character is either black or white. There is no morally gray character. You call it an epic fantasy yet you don’t include characters that tread beyond good or evil. There is no complexity or build up to any character and no consequences to their actions. It’s like “Oh I fought a wyvern in the town hall with nothing but my utter stupidity. Oh people died? I don’t care….you see they are not main characters of the story; I am. Pay attention to me.” It takes real talent to make a fire-wielding mage/ assassin a naïve bland character with no flair. Again with no build up she kills trained people, uses fire, fights wyvern and a mentor figure pretty easily. And with all the fights and killing one expects a duality in morale or an inner conflict but she has none. Because she is always in the right. How is that even relatable by any means? Let’s not talk about Loth. He’s just a plot device only there to move the story forward. Now with the dragon rider from east….well there isn’t much dragon riding to begin with. She remains largely absent throughout the story. Her character starts as one of the few interesting things in the book but hundreds of pages and book full of life-changing events later there is essentially no growth in her character. Her character development remains nil. It’s pretty disappointing to see 800+ pages full of dull characters. Some reactions of the characters to specific events in the book are so convoluted that it seems like it’s forced upon and naturally you can not relate to it at all. The characters are so distant that the unfortunate circumstances they face leave no lasting effect at all. Events that should have been heart wrenching barely leaves a mark.
• This is not a Feminist story; this is a gender reversal story. The way it has been marketed is so wrong. It has been said to be “A Feminist successor to Lord of The Rings”, well making most of the characters female and all the male characters significantly weak doesn’t make a story feminist. Author just reversed the gender roles but continued with a same sexist storytelling. This is certainly not empowering. Let’s dive a little deep. As we see The Priory of The Orange Tree tells a story of a queendom. But this is only ruled by queens because they only happen to have female progeny. None of the queens actually earned the throne. There only achievement was to be born. There was no struggle no fear of losing the throne and yet people still revered the bloodline, no questions asked. How is that empowering? Even if we don’t take into account the whole ‘female only heir’ part, the Queen is only a queen by name, she is always just being manipulated by others into doing what they want. Yay! Go feminism! For the most part of the story the Queen is only relevant because she has the ability to reproduce the next Queen. Oh so original! I often come across people complaining about The Wheel of Time and Robert Jordan about their weak handling of the female characters but after reading this I can definitely say what Robert Jordan did with the female characters is far above and beyond anything this book has to offer. He gave us an actual Queendom where the queen is not just a figurehead. She has to fight for her claim to the throne and her people and who actually thinks her subjects to be the most important part of her Queendom. In WoT we actually see lots of strong female characters with depth, own personality, inner conflict and the change of perspective as the story progresses. And we see none in Priory. Here the Queen is just a naïve woman-child in her late 20’s who just throws temper tantrums and has no regard for her subjects or whatsoever. This is a queen who is jealous of her to be born child because to her understanding after giving birth to an heir her duty will be fulfilled and she will be cast aside and she won’t have the centre stage. How is that empowering when the Queen of the story sees herself only as a mere mean of childbearing? In the book it is well established that a woman has two choices, either have a child or live for herself. She has to sacrifice her ambition in order to raise a child or she has to sacrifice motherhood in order to be someone important. She can’t be a good mother and be a let’s say a figure that people look up to. That is pretty clear from the lack of mother figures that play an important role in the plot of the story. In this day and age the author just put her so called strong female characters in that traditional binary and still expects the reader to hail this book as a game-changing feminist novel.
• The plot heavily depends upon coincidences, instinct and intuitions; another example of poor writing. The author could have justified those actions by using the environment and surrounding in a more methodical way or by more natural means but she went with easiest way possible, i.e. coincidences. The characters just find the objects they look for or when they are facing some life threatening conditions they just happen to stumble upon ways for their ridiculous escape. And every character has like god gifted intuition. They are so on point that it is ridiculous. This eliminates any chance of tension building. Not just one or two characters, every character has spot on instincts. The celestial jewels that were lost for thousand years just happen to be lying around in the coffin of the person who last used it. The overhyped super powerful sword that can slay the big bad villain is missing for a thousand years and is being look for since its disappearance but to no success. Suddenly a guy remembers where the sword is supposed to be and voila! The sword is there. That place also happens to be the birthplace of the knight who first wielded the sword. I am no ruler but if I wanted to find that sword wouldn’t I look for it in that place first? Now for the fun part, the riddles! There are riddles here and there and the characters just solve the most complex of them with relative ease, conjuring solution out of thin air. For example by sheer luck (like several other instances in the novel) a character once happened to have played in a location during her childhood which is actually the solution of the riddle for the location of the great Wyvern killing sword because screw well-thought-out-treasure-hunting-quest. This is a pretty big flaw. This kind of writing prevented any kind of serious threat building. The story lacks plausible threats and suspense. There is a big wyvern in the cover which may lead audience to think that they possess a great threat but no. There are more political agendas in his book than the number of appearances the draconic creatures make. The main characters are actually more concerned about their political and religious standing than the world ending threat looming over the horizon. From the beginning the author is establishing a narrative about a world that is on the brink of chaos as the big bad evil is about to rise once again and his underlings are loose, wreaking havoc over the world. There is also a deadly plague spreading over the population that is also an indicator of increasing power of the ancient villain. But among these super deadly conditions the death toll is surprisingly very low. Apart from that there are nations at war, inner politics, betrayals, random riots by heretics and yet people come out of it with little of their dead. Even when we see the so called army leaders of the draconic army attack the city they are happier with a conversation and bare minimum casualties. I don’t know but if someone wants to take over the world, he/she would want to demonstrate their devastating power by let’s say burning a city to the ground so people actually take them as a world ending threat. Like the human characters the author has managed to make her reptilian characters bland too. Even the villains lacked personality and ambition. Again the progress of the story heavily depends upon “Somehow she knew what to do” and “Instincts told her how to use it”, proving severe lack of imagination from the author’s part.
I want to point out to a specific part in the story. We see a character going into coma a few times and one time she is in that state for weeks (can you imagine?) after being poisoned; there was no medicinal remedy available for the poison and no way to force-feed a patient in a state of coma and yet she is fed only drops of honey for weeks like that’s all it is needed to keep her going (apparently it was). And finally when she is out of coma with the help of few drops of honey, her brain is totally well functional. No damage, no brain weakness, nothing. After such a long period in a state of unconsciousness you would expect some difficulty in orientation at the very least, but know we don’t have that here. As soon as she wakes up she is totally fine with all the memories and lies she was holding onto before going into coma. Though she is describes physically weak post-coma, this doesn’t last long. After few hours she is up and about like her pre-coma self and is literally ready to have sex with her lover that very day. I don’t know if it could have been any worse.
• There is so much dull info dumping that it gets frustratingly boring. You have an 800pages book where there is a world levelling threat and the build up is 750+ pages. It’s just plain gruelling. And when the last battle actually occurs, it’s just disappointing and anti-climatic. The amount of unimportant information this book contains is enough to be published as another ‘Stand Alone’. For example whenever we see a character, she is introduced as “This is X, daughter of Y who was the granddaughter of Z who helped in slaying D who was the great general of …….and so on”. I could have looked over it if it was done only few times and while introducing the characters but no, it is done with most characters over and over again till the end. Even after we get all the details about the characters we still get the same info over and over again. With all this information lying around the author never actually tries to give information about the landscape and the world in which the story is set in. Whenever there is a long journey and a scope for exploring a new world she just stops trying. Every time a character goes on a long journey he/she just stumbles upon great mythical beasts that carry them to their destination in superfast mind-numbing pace.
• Now let’s talk about the romance part.
The primary relationship/the lesbian relationship was sudden, strange, confusingly-written and very clumsily executed. First we see one being uncomfortable by the feelings she develops for the other, then we see her being jealous of the other’s lover and then we see the other suddenly giving attention to her in spite of having a lover. All of this happens without one conveying her feelings even slightly to the other. Strong romances cannot be built upon unspoken emotions, especially upon weirdly written emotions. They hardly have enough interactions before they have full-blown sex. The timing of the sex could not have been weirder. One had just miscarried and been under the knife and was still recovering from all the bruises she received during a wyrm invasion. That’s just not how general human physiology works.
Now for the secondary relationship/the gay relationship; in this world it is well established that the society is comfortable with homosexual relationships and yet they had to hide their relationship from the society. The gay male character was married to a woman and the wife knew all along that he was in a secret relationship with a man but she didn’t harbour any ill feelings against him to make sure her husband is happy. It just does not make any sense at all. She wanted her husband to be happy and yet he had to live a lie and sneak behind her back to be with his lover. Clearly the other man was making him happy so why not let them live their life together? This whole plot line was a mess, just like many others.
• To sum it all up, the book did not sit well with me at all. The whole thing just felt like a big bowl of flattery that each character threw towards the other characters. Don’t believe the reviews you see on the cover. These are not all the flaws I encountered, these are some of the flaws I encountered while reading the book which I felt like mentioning in my long review.
That’s all. Cheers.
The Shadow of What Was Lost by James Islington
5.0
4.5 for me. The writing style is what I am looking forward to in the next installment.